Founding texts of geopoetics

The Great Field of Geopoetics

A theory? Yes. No need to be afraid of the word, which has been set aside of late, leaving space to be filled up with a mushy mass, a crazy mix, of bits and pieces. Without theory, thought goes round in circles, commentaries and opinions abound, the mind gets clogged up by imagination and fantasy, every gesture gets lost in the big showbiz, details pile up without perspective, life gets stifled in a daily routine that is more and more opaque and senseless.

But, to be valid at all, theory must be based on fundamental thought, must be connected to substantial practice, must remain open (which doesn’t mean open to anything).

On the Highway of History

For a mind that is both lucid and endowed with a sense of the possible, rare indeed are the periods of human history that have been satisfying, far less delightful. The overall feeling one can have of ours, at the end of the twentieth, beginning of the twenty-first century, is of a nothingness – a nothingness full of noise and fury, pious preachings, empty promises, sociological statistics, piles of pseudo-culture, oodles of syrupy sentimentality, all of it against a backdrop of existential boredom (to espace from which anything goes).

Geopoetics – A Scientific Approach

In the field of science, Einstein’s Cosmological Considerations (1917) mark a turning point: what you have there is an attempt to think of the cosmos as a whole instead of simply weighing and measuring its parts.

Rather than a commentary on this text (they exist elsewhere), what I propose, in our particular context, is to delve into the psychological background of this research as evidenced in Einstein’s private correspondence, notably with Max Born. Phrases turn up there that indicate, back of « research », an intimate problematics, an existential questioning, a general space of thought.

Geopoetics – A Philosophical Approach

The French essayist Roger Caillois compared philosophy as habitually practised to the tusks of a mammoth, so ponderously heavy that, no longer able to thrust forward, coiled in on themselves, becoming strictly inoperative, though perhaps decorative.

The image is that of a discipline in its final stage and the lack of a real field of cognitive, cogitative forces. Which is no doubt why so many apprentice philosophers, their studies completed, tired of ploughing through so many opaque and repetitive texts, have turned rather to ethnology, sociology, psychology.

But within philosophy itself, as early as the end of the nineteenth century, marginally, subterraneously, often totally unseen, and when seen grotesquely misunderstood, has taken place a series of displacements, topological transformations much more radical than what was going on in the more and more crowded precincts of the « human sciences ».

It begins with Nietzsche.

Founding texts of geopoetics

More Articles ...